


(how did) your debts get paid

by dilangley



Category: Jurassic Park - All Media Types, Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Bleak, F/M, Gen, apocalypse au, deadly virus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-19 15:22:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15512757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: It's been 25 years since John Hammond's experiment sent dinosaurs around the globe, putting in motion a devastating chain reaction. Owen Grady lives in the California woods when a little girl on the run and a woman hunting her both show up in his life. He is dragged back into the world he left behind years ago, and it isn't pretty.[Jurassic World Apocalyptic AU]





	1. valley of the shadow

Owen kicks a chunk of cement and stares up at the soft blue sky. He licks his lips, purses them round, and whistles.

Nothing answers. A whole town of silence stretches in front of him.

It’s been a while since he came to town, but it’s been even longer since he stopped marking time on the side of a fallen redwood tree. It may have been a few months or it may have been a year. He does not know. It does not matter.

He sets to work, one building at a time. Hardware stores, Walmart, everything like that is pointless. When the outbreak started, people ransacked those places first on their way to anywhere else. He focuses on houses with garages and prominent sheds. Both features suggest men lived in those homes, and men meant tools and guns.

He used to take his time to pick up personal belongings, read the scraps of normalcy people left behind. Now he ignores them entirely. He loads up his backpack with his finds: two rolls of duct tape, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, six bullets for a revolver, and four cans of beans. He moves onto the next house without looking at the magazines on the counter.

He hits three more houses before his pack reaches its limit. He could carry more, even with the straps digging into his shoulders and the torso buckle pinching his stomach, but the fabric strains.

Clouds start to roll in.  


\--------------------

 

 _Excerpt from_ Time _magazine, June 1993:_

The InGen corporation began its work in ecotourism with a failed attempt to isolate its deextinction process to a single theme park off Costa Rica. After being shut down by the local government who made it impossible to afford the permits and licensing for Jurassic Park to welcome visitors, visionary John Hammond saw a different future for his creations.

“The dinosaurs were never meant to be for the super-rich. They were meant to be for all of us,” he explained. “Zoos did not believe it was possible until Jurassic Park. Now they are believers preparing space for large sauropods and carnivores. It is a new world.”

The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are slated to reach their new homes in zoos around the world within 6 months, but the new world Hammond envisions does not stop with the rehoming of 35 specimens. He has also sold research rights and patents to zoos and facilities around the world.

“Incredible, meaningful technology in the hands of reputable innovators. Animals and humans both win,” Hammond says.

 

\-------------------

 

The rumble, once the backbeat of America, is unfamiliar to him now, and Owen must consider for a moment before he realizes what he is hearing. It is not thunder but trucks traversing old, broken roads.

“The hell?” His voice creaks, rusty from disuse. He remembers the last time he saw vehicles here, when trucks and tanks escorted Jeeps, barely filled with people, out of the area, leaving behind a hospital teeming with people too sick to stand up. No one cared about saving the sick anymore. They were too afraid of never being able to stop this.

He ducks behind the front door of a little white rambler and watches the direction of the sound. He expects to see a truck with full standard-issue military men, surveying the remains of a time long gone. Instead, an old Bronco rolls into view, windows down, the driver with an Asian man, bearded and unkempt, the passenger a redheaded woman, streaked with dirt.

They idle in front of the house, two sets of eyes searching everywhere.

“She can’t have gone far.” He hears the driver say.

“You might have been mistaken about seeing her.” The woman’s voice is weary. “Or you might be wrong about who you saw. That could have been any little girl.”

“It amazes me that you think I could devote my life to this research and not recognize such a unique prototype.”

The woman looks around one more time, and even from 50 yards away, through a grimy front door window, Owen sees the exhaustion in her eyes.

“Then step on it. If she’s what you think she is, she’s fast,” she says.

The Bronco rumbles away again. Three more vehicles roll lazily along, their headlights like searching eyes peering through the grey haze.  


\--------------------

 

 _Excerpt from_ The Associated Press, _October 1997_ :

A patient typically goes first to his primary care physician to be seen about mundane flu-like symptoms: congestion, headache, and muscle cramps, but within 12 hours, he needs immediate admission to a hospital’s most secure ward. His sniffles are replaced by hallucinations, his aches with unprecedented aggression. One patient shredded his hospital bed before restraints were applied. Another ripped a golf ball-sized chunk of flesh from his wife’s arm with his teeth. These episodes seem to last anywhere from three days to three weeks before the patient dies or emerges without normal brain function. There are 345 cases reported worldwide across a variety of climates and cultures. Researchers and doctors urge people to wash their hands and take ordinary wellbeing precautions.

“There is no reason to panic,” Dr. Joel Moxan reminds us. “Statistically, this is barely measurable. No population even has a .01% risk of infection at this point.”  


\----------------------

 

Owen waits until he cannot hear the cars anymore before he starts walking. He picks his way through houses instead of the outside, more startled than he expected by this brush with humanity. He isn’t sure how long it’s been since he saw another person.

In the third house, his ears perk up again. He hears the slam and rustle of kitchen doors being pulled open. Someone with hungry hands is inside. Even though he knows the smart thing to do is walk the other way, his curiosity leads him toward the sound. He takes the gun from the small of his back, chambers a round. Years of military training, years ago, make him confident he can fire faster than an ordinary looter.

But this may not be an ordinary looter. His brain turns over the overheard conversation from the Bronco and tries to fit it into some kind of sense.

He rounds the corner.

“Come any closer, and I’ll stab you!” The voice is thin, terrified, but sharp as steel, a wicked blade concealed for emergencies. The little girl holds out a butcher’s knife in front of her.

“Gun beats knife. Put it down, kid,” Owen says. He holds one hand out, conciliatory, but in the other, keeps the gun trained on her. He lowers it just enough for a shot to be nonlethal. Of course, a shot to the leg in a town that hasn’t seen doctors in years might just be meaner.

“No.” She spits at him, throws the knife, and runs. For a moment, he thinks about letting her go. Then some other instinct kicks up instead. It might have been funny in another lifetime, in another situation, a former Navy operative chasing an unarmed kid down a hallway. It might have been even funnier that the kid didn’t recognize the standard modular configuration with a bathroom at the end of the hall. Owen does not laugh as she dead ends in the powder room; he just blocks the door.

“Listen. I’m not trying to do anything except give you a warning.” He jams his gun back into his waistband. “You’ve got a caravan of heavy-duty vehicles out there looking for you.”

He takes stock of her while she sizes him up. She has no poker face. He can feel her eyes checking him over for weaknesses, trying to find a trick knee to kick or soft pad between thumb and forefinger to bite, anything to incapacitate him long enough to get her through the door. She’s slim, probably too slim for however old she is, and he can tell she is still on the kid side of teenager. But she looks uninjured and ordinary.

“Yeah. So?” She turns her words into weapons, shoots them at him.

“So I’m thinking a little girl with a butcher knife doesn’t stand a chance.”

“I should just give up then.” Her voice drips disdain. “Let them do whatever they want with me.”

When the government asked their Navy boys to start gunning down citizens and animals, he led a revolt, convinced his whole unit to turn the tables. They saved three hundred, four hundred, people slated to die, about half as many animals too. That was a long time ago. What he did probably didn’t help anyone. They’re all probably dead now, probably dead in worse ways than quick, clean headshots or bright, hot bombs.

Somewhere closer to civilization, his face is likely on a wanted poster. He could have turned himself in after his little insurrection. Looking around this bleak landscape, he sometimes forgets why he bothered to run.

But he remembers now, looking at her defiant chin and sparking eyes. He remembers knowing down in his very bones how he was not going to die.

“No. You don’t ever give up. But you might try asking for help.” He wonders what the hell he is doing. She sucks in a breath, looks around the tiny bathroom. She is a feral animal backed into a corner.

“What happens if I don’t?”

“Nothing.” He steps aside. “Like I said, I just wanted to warn you.”

She nods and races down the hallway. Her sneakers make a dull thump on the laminate floor as she disappears from sight.

“You’re welcome,” he mutters.  


\-----------------------

 

_Advertisement script for the new Mosasaurus exhibit at SeaWorld Orlando, March 1994:_

**Voiceover te** xt: And you thought killer whales were amazing! Come join us this summer to experience our new Prehistoric Predators exhibit. First test your courage on The Megladon, a thrilling, high-speed inverted coaster to take you on the hunt for the greatest of white sharks. Then come to the new amphitheater to meet our Mosasaurs, two fifty-foot pieces of predatory perfection.

 **Image:** Silhouette of Mosasaurus eating a Great White Shark

 **Tagline:** This summer, the ocean is  theirs.

  


\--------------------

 

Rain spills down so steadily and neatly that it comes in curtains, tidy rows of droplets equidistant from each other and at a constant speed. Owen shrugs his raincoat on before moving out. He jogs with easy, fluid strides, loose and comfortable. The footing is still firm, safe. He will make it back to camp before nightfall.

The rain muffles sound and sight, but he relaxes as the landscape changes from houses and overgrown domestic shrubbery to trees and wild foliage. He used to spend all his free time out in the woods as a kid. Even on rainy days, he would climb trees and build forts as the warm, fresh smell enveloped everything. He never came back inside for dinner until just late enough to scare his mother half to death.

So deep is he in his memories that he is nearly back to his camp before he realizes he is being followed.

She’s good -- the kid. How she manages not to slop about in the rapidly developing mud, he has no idea. No broken sticks. No loud noises. But when he pauses for a moment to wipe water from his eyes, her footsteps stop a moment too late.

“I’m not going to pull a gun on you twice in one day, but you’re lucky I heard you. It probably saved your life. You don’t want to sneak up on my camp,” he calls out. Only the rain answers.

He tries again. “Kid, I’ve given you fair warning once today, so you know I’m not lying to you.”

She emerges from behind a tree trunk. Soaked through her clothes, against the backdrop of the vast woods, she is smaller than before. The teenager estimate now feels generous. He notices her thin tee shirt, ripped along the bottom.

“What’s so deadly about your camp?” She asks.

“I’ve got a Velociraptor.”

“What?” Her eyes widen.

“Y’know, sharp teeth, sharp claws, bipedal. A Velociraptor.”

“Can I see?”

It’s not the reaction he was expecting.

 

\---------------------

 

_Handwritten notes from the files of Dr. Rebecca Magnus, December 29, 1997:_

Transmission:

Fluid contact → Yes

Surface contact → Yes… Hep. B can live on a table 7 days. May = same infectious period.

Airborne → Not yet…

 

\------------------

  


His camp is simple, homey in its own way. The shelters form a broad ring around a central fire pit. Safety in the illusion of numbers has been his friend on the rare occasion someone has come along looking to loot. Pieces of wood, hand-milled and uneven, tied together with ropes, made a better home than many others he had over the years, even before the world fell apart.

He watches the girl look around it, watches the flicker of longing on her face. His stomach knots.

“Are you hungry?” He asks, knowing the answer already. She shakes her head. “Are we really still doing the lying thing?”

“Fine. I’m hungry.”

“That’s what I thought.” He grabs a can opener out of its milk crate and pulls a can of beans out of the backpack. “If it wasn’t so wet, we could heat them up. As it is, well, bon appetit.”

She accepts the can and the dirty spoon. She slurps as she wolfs it down. He opens his own can and eats more conservatively. The rain continues to pelt them as they stand and eat in the dark. Owen wants to offer her a seat, wants to ask her questions, but every time he moves too suddenly, she stiffens like a deer hearing a twig break. He feels like a child predator, luring her here using her desire to see a raptor and now trying to keep her, but he doesn’t want to find her body out here in the woods tomorrow morning.

“Where is the Velociraptor?” She finally asks when her can is empty.

“Her name’s Blue, and she pretty much comes and goes as she pleases. She’s probably closer than you think right now.” He reaches under the shelter for a crate and sits down. “There’s a couple more of those if you want to sit. She may not come anywhere close until she figures you out.”

“Thank you.” She accepts. “Thank you for feeding me and giving me that warning back there.”

“No problem.” He waits. First, she puts her hands on her knees, leans forward, pushes her eyes wide open to disguise how badly they want to close. Her face wrinkles beyond her age with exhaustion.

When she can stay awake no longer, she stands up, paces a little. Owen waits, even when his left leg falls asleep and his nose itches. He stays perfectly still.

Finally, she cracks. “I’m Maisie.”

He smiles down at his boots, careful not to let her see it. “Owen.”

“I’m running from the military.”

He thinks about the duo in the Bronco. They weren’t military. He keeps that opinion to himself. “Yeah? Me too. Not that I have to do much running anymore. This part of the country’s quiet these days. Until little girls chased by trucks show up.”

“I’m not a little girl. I’m twelve.”

“Well, shit, kid. I don’t even know why I wanted to look out for you then. You’re all grown up.”

“Yeah. I am.” She juts her chin out. “But I’d like to stay here tonight.”

Owen resists the urge to tell her he was never planning on anything else. “Of course. I’ve got blankets.”

“Thank you.”

Even though he is the one doing her a favor, when the evening ends and he can hear the soft snuffle of another human breathing, Owen is the one who feels a little more alive. He will say thank you in his own way in the morning. Maybe by then, he will have figured out how.

He stays awake in case Blue comes around and doesn't understand. She doesn't show.


	2. of death

Maisie stays. She doesn’t mean to. Every morning, she wakes up and tells herself she is going to run, snatch as much of Owen’s gear as she can and get as far away as her legs will carry her. 

Then she eats whatever he has around and talks to him instead. She tries to bite down on the corners of her mouth and catch all the words, but they come out anyway like she wants to tell him everything about her. She keeps hold of the secrets, locks them away behind her molars, swallows them a hundred times a day, but the ordinary thoughts fly. 

“I never knew my parents,” she tells him on Day Three.

“Pancakes are my favorite breakfast. My grandfather used to make them for me when the ration line gave out flour and sugar,” she says on Day Five.

He continues to tell her nothing about himself, but he’s a good listener. He remembers everything she says, finds ways to build on it, shows her some edible berries to smash up with his flour to make something kind of like pancakes.

His Velociraptor never shows up. She starts to think Blue doesn’t exist. There are so many possibilities: maybe Blue died months ago in an accident and Owen just pretends she is still alive out there, maybe Blue never existed at all because Velociraptors aren’t pets, maybe Owen would have said anything to keep Maisie there and keep her death from exposure off his conscience.

She likes the story though. She listens every time she can get him to tell it. Blue was born into a government program back before the dinosaurs were bad. She was raised to be around humans, raised to track, and she still likes company. Blue likes fresh-caught fish, tearing apart old rubber tires, and not having to wear a radio collar anymore. 

If she exists, that is. If not, she’s just a nice story, and Maisie hasn’t gotten to hear many of those lately.

Owen shows Maisie how to hunt. The first time she pulls the trigger on his long-arm rifle, it kicks back hard, and the doe runs away. By the time she gets it right, she has deep, burning bruises in her shoulder and a sick stomach. Her reward for learning a new trade is a dead deer, staring at them with glassy, sightless eyes.

But later, when it is gutted and filleted and cooked over a fire, the sweet meat makes her pinched stomach stop crying. 

She doesn’t think it will be hard to kill again.

  
  


\--------------------------

  
  


_ Dr. Henry Wu’s shared lab notes, December 1992: _

This most recent test run has stabilized the genome. The viable specimen uses J132 in the sequencer. Its contents are classified for the safety of this venture. Please see Dr. Wu with any questions or concerns.

  
  


\----------------------- 

  
  


There are people coming through the woods, maybe half a mile off.

They move loudly, so loudly Maisie cannot tell if she or Owen wakes up first. She is aware of them both laying still, under opposite wooden structures, listening. Because he never talks about himself, she cannot know what training or experience he is calling upon.

But she has been running for months, and she knows any sound that makes the hairs on her neck prickle up and breaks out gooseflesh on her legs means it is time to go.

“I have to get out of here,” she whispers into the darkness. Owen clambers soundlessly to his feet and shakes his head. He points up, and she follows his finger to low hanging branches on the tree nearest them. He does not wait for her, scrambles up like a squirrel, his rifle already strapped to his back. When she follows, she fumbles, adjusting her footing, sliding her hands to new places. The bark digs into her fingers and knees. 

She cannot reach as high as Owen. She stops in the safe embrace of an evergreen bough, hides in its elegant green needles. They wait. 

The group emerges into view, eight people, walking in formation. Maisie remembers when they once passed within two feet of her, hidden in a pile of mildewed clothes in a rotting closet. 

Anger, low and powerful, boils in her veins. They will turn her into an experiment. They will wrestle her into test tubes and restraints and give her an identification number.

She wishes she had told Owen more. She wishes he could burn with this same anger. Then he might kill them. She would feel better if they were dead. She would feel safe.

“Where is she?” The man, the leader, asks. He kicks a crate. “She was supposed to be here.”

“Henry, this is a fool’s errand. Lockwood died months ago. His body had decomposed beyond recognition. There’s no evidence she is even alive. We can start over.” The woman speaks, but she kneels down, lays her hand on the bedroll Maisie just rested on. Through the darkness, Maisie sees her face change.

“Start over?” Henry laughs. “Start over? There is no place to begin. We have passed by colonies of survivors trying to learn how to grow corn. Thousands of years of science has been lost to the ignorance of the present, and one little girl represents our chance to reclaim it.”

“Someone was just here,” The woman murmurs. “It’s still warm.”

“Yes.” His glee is maniacal. “Find her.”

The other six men scatter throughout the camp.

“She didn’t build all this herself,” The woman says. Maisie holds her breath.

“Anyone in our way is expendable.” Henry’s eyes are ice.

Maisie watches while they search, tearing apart the camp, throwing Owen’s supplies everywhere.

Maisie imagines the air in her lungs as a balloon in her hands and presses it smaller, forces herself not to expand and contract with as much force. When she can no longer hear her breaths, she smiles. She can still hear the pounding of Owen’s heart, the rush of his exhales. Hers are silent.

One man unspools an entire roll of duct tape, throws it on the dirty ground. Another looks up. A grin emerges in his scraggly beard.

“I’ve got her,” he chuckles.

Maisie looks down and realizes she cannot see her left foot. It dangles just below the bough, hidden from her view, visible from below.

  
  


\-------------------------

  
  


_ Excerpt from CDC Special Bulletin, June 1998: _

Researchers now believe the disease, called the CHA virus by the media,  belongs to the order Mononegavirales, viruses with nonsegmented, negative-stranded RNA genomes. Within this group, viruses with a distinct “bullet” shape are classified in the Rhabdoviridae family. These viruses include rabies, Mokola, and the Australian bat virus. Though the virus is transmitted via fluid contact, including saliva, it has a long incubation period on surfaces. Independent researchers estimate dried blood may remain dangerous for up to a week.

Communities affected by this virus should call (202) 671-7333 to register and follow all preliminary emergency protocol.

 

\------------------------

 

“Do we shoot?” One of the ragtag men asks, and Henry actually hisses.

“No! You indescribable moron. That girl is priceless,” he says. “Someone climb up and yank her down.”

Owen’s hands close tightly on her shoulders from above, as if willpower and grip strength could protect her from what was coming. She hears the scrape of shoes on the bark, and her heart begins to thud faster than she can control.

“Owen, please,” she whispers. He shifts, pulls his gun loose.

“Pull back the branch,” he whispers back. When she does, she sees the eyes below, focused upward on the climb. Owen fires on an exhale, blows a hole through the man’s shoulder. Bloody spray dots her shoe as the man fumbles backward, hits the dirt with an almost comical oof.

“Holy shit,” someone on the ground cries.

“Move!” Owen bellows, and Maisie shimmies out of his way, watches him hit the ground with a grunt, absorbing the impact in both feet before lurching to a stumbling run. The other men spring into action, reaching for guns. Maisie keeps her eyes on the woman who fumbles at her belt but comes away with nothing. She is unarmed.

The woman turns her head and sees the gun Maisie has been hunting with, resting against the shelter. She leans toward the step she is about to take.

Maisie climbs down the tree faster than Owen fell, finds two feet and races the other woman to the weapon. They close on it together, four hands taking unbreakable hold. Other gunshots, grunts, and groans ring in Maisie’s ears. She cannot distinguish Owen from any other man, not by sound; she doesn’t know him that well yet. She may never know him that well.

“Come with us. I don’t want to hurt you,” the other woman pleads even as she wrestles for the gun.

“Fuck you,” Maisie replies, and the words taste good.

  
  


\------------------------

 

_ Excerpt of email to a commanding Naval officer, June 1999: _

The world is burning down around us, and you have some of your most highly trained operatives invested in an outdated training program. We already know dinosaurs were the first species to transfer CHA to humans, even if the public doesn’t yet. We need to terminate Operation Overland and terminate the dinosaurs in our care.

My team and I are making this our official, if strongly worded, request to join the National Guard and other service branches in offering aid to affected communities and to establishing orderly quarantine zones.

Sincerely, 

Owen Grady

 

\---------------------

 

The scream is nothing Maisie has ever heard before. The man cries out from lungs already contracted, pushes sound through clenched teeth and trembling vocal chords. Both the woman and Maisie turn, involuntarily, immediately, to the sound.

“Blue,” Maisie hears herself whisper the name reverently. She never questions what kind of world she inhabits where the long-awaited Messiah has 9-inch toe claws slashing out the bowels of a man. The Velociraptor is pebbled, sleek, and ripping off another man’s face. 

Maisie wrestles the gun out of the woman’s hand in her moment of shock. Surprise is weakness, and Maisie has never been weak. 

She pulls down the bolt and squeezes the trigger and does not miss. The woman falls backward, blood blossoming out in brilliant crimson on her abdomen. She cries out when she hits the ground, shudders in disbelief at her own breath, still coming in and out.

Maisie’s life roars in her ears, the terrifying din of crickets when sleeping alone for the first time, the angry roiling of her stomach on the fourth day without food, the scratchy whisper of eavesdropped conversations becoming the beat to which she ran. Her eyes blur with the utter darkness of nights without fire or flashlight, the sudden watercolor of a world through tears, the ever-changing scenery of never getting to stay in one place for long.

She straightens up and stands over the woman. She lifts the gun back to her shoulder, readies her bruise for another impact.

“Holy shit, Maisie, no!” Owen’s voice pierces through the cacophony in her ears. She turns to his voice and suddenly sees the decimation. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Blue chirps, delicately rips a long strand of flesh from a body below her. Owen still kneels beside a body, his fingers pressing for a pulse, but his head has snapped up to look at her.

His eyes are on her.

“Why?” Her voice shakes. “Everyone else looking for me is already dead. One more.”

The woman on the ground says nothing, her eyes wide and sightless, her mouth gaping like a fish, gasping for water as it dies in air. She squares the gun evenly on the forehead. She has never shot anything up close like this before. She wonders if the blood will splatter up all over her. How much blood will there be?

“No, not like this.” And somehow Owen is there, taking the gun out of her hands, shaking his head, grabbing at her arms, checking her for injuries, somehow doing a hundred things with only two hands. 

Maisie lets him.

  
  


\-----------------------

 

_ Dr. Henry Wu’s private notes, December 1992: _

Human DNA must comprise no more than 10% of the genome. Earlier test sequences found the mix of mammalian and reptilian characteristics could create a viable embryo with a higher percentage. The human genome is the most studied in the world. Using it to fill gaps shortens our research time frame dramatically. 

Confidentiality is key. 

  
  


\-----------------------

  
  


They count the dead together. Six. Not seven. Six. All of them are nondescript white men. No one is Asian. Even if she had killed the woman, it would not be over. 

Maisie watches Owen kneel over the woman. He administers field medical care. With blood on both hands, he scratches his nose and leaves a streak; with a pair of pliers, he digs out a bullet, and with a tiny sewing kit, he tries to patch together an open wound. 

She knows she should offer to help him, but she cannot make herself move. She cannot make herself do anything except stare at him and Blue. Blue continues to feast on the fallen. No one stops her.

“Damn it. More blood,” Owen murmurs. He steps away, keeping one hand pressed to the abdomen until he can pick up a shirt and cover it. 

“She’s going to die,” Maisie says. “You would have made me shoot a deer again to put it out of its misery.”

“A person’s not a deer. Not even in this world.”

Maisie opens her mouth to reply, but she has nothing to say. He still refers to the world, the only one she has ever known, as if it is some terrible nightmare to wake up from, as if it is temporary fiction.

“There’s only one world, Owen,” she finally mutters.

“Pretty cold outlook from a girl who threw up after her first hunting trip just a week ago.”

She didn’t know he had seen that.

“I just want to be safe.” She walks over and holds out her hands, volunteers to help. He accepts, pushes her hands down on the bleeding.

“That’s all any of us want, kid.”

They patch the woman up together without any more words, and Maisie tries to convince herself she is glad to still feel the rise and fall of shallow breathing under her hands.


	3. i'll fear no

Owen watches her get better, the bleeding stopped by another hasty round of stitches, the color returning to her cheeks, her breathing steadying.

Then he watches her get worse, much worse, not the kind of worse that will kill her in minutes but the kind of worse that will kill her in long, agonizing days. Her skin becomes cold, clammy, sticky grey, and she shakes when she breathes. He sees how yellow her teeth have become only because they begin to chatter.

The wound is infected, and even though this infection is no threat to anyone else, it will kill her.

He sleeps beside her. He tells himself it is to monitor her breathing. He pretends it has nothing to do with the fact that Blue now circles the outside of the camp openly, her eyes watching. The first time he noticed her feeding on the dead, he chased her off, but the clever girl just searched for openings to drag the bodies away, feasted in the private darkness of the forest.

She is a vulture waiting for her pound of flesh. She knows it's coming.

“How is she this morning?” Maisie asks, pointing at the woman, and Owen doesn’t know what answer the kid hopes for. 

“Worse,” he replies.

“It’s been a week. If she’s lived this long, she should be okay,” Maisie replies. Her innocence and understanding are a mixed bag. For all her survival skills, her knowledge gaps are huge.

“The entry site is infected,” he explains. “She needs antibiotics.”

“In town?”

He chuckles mirthlessly. “Maybe. If we were really, really lucky.”

Owen looks down at the woman’s shaking, shivering body and wishes he knew more. If he knew anything about plants, he might be able to help her right here. When he was eighteen, picking a future, he could have become a doctor or learned all about botany or volunteered at the Red Cross. He could have learned every second of every day -- the ability had been there, the information never far away -- and instead he had taken it all for granted.

As it is, he will have to move her.

He rifles through his items and fills his backpack with the best things he can find. He shoulders both long guns. Blue huffs behind him, takes an inquisitive step forward.

“What can I do?” Maisie asks.

“Nothing.” The weight of the word presses painfully down on him. He cannot leave Maisie here with the woman; he trusts neither Maisie nor Blue. He cannot send Maisie alone to town; anything could happen to her. He forces a smile. “Keep me company on this walk. It’s going to be slow going.”

“I can do that,” Maisie says, shouldering her backpack. They set out together, the woman on a makeshift sled of ropes and tarp, Owen pulling and Maisie at his side. Blue follows at distance, a shark behind a sinking ship.

  
  


\----------------------------

  
  


_ Internal memo, Brooklyn Zoo, October 1995: _

Until our security team is able to author new Velociraptor protocols, all zoo personnel must take the following precautions:

  1. The Velociraptor enclosure is not to be entered under any circumstances.
  2. Velociraptors will be fed by the automated trough system.
  3. Velociraptor excrement is to be collected via long-pole and only while in a harness.
  4. Any changes to the enclosure exterior are to be reported immediately.
  5. The Velociraptor Viewing Pavilion is closed until further notice.



  
  


\-------------------------

  
  


It takes four piteously long days to reach a hospital not ransacked by looters. 

Blue does not follow them out of the forest, and Maisie pretends the walking is okay. Owen watches her rub angry red blisters when they sit down for a few hours rest. He also pretends, makes as if he does not see the sorry state of her feet, because he has nothing to offer her. If they slow down, the woman will die, and duct tape is a poor substitute for a band-aid.

They follow blue hospital signs on the roadway. Maisie peppers him with questions.

“Why did they put gates up at that part of the road?” She asks. “You can still get around.”

“Symbolic.” He swallows down more information and aims for a flip comment instead. “California is closed.”

“Do you remember when it happened?”

He nods and says nothing more. Of course a child, even one with sharp hazel eyes and steel in her jaw, cannot recognize the ridiculousness of the question. Every adult left in the world remembers the two weeks when it happened, each life severed completely into a Before and an After. When they closed the roads, he had been moving in the opposite direction, watching the desperate parade of headlights from his place in the treeline.

“Let’s go. We’re getting close,” he replies instead. He sees a roof, just visible at distance.

Owen walks faster.  The ache in his arms intensifies in anticipation of arrival.

The rural hospital lurks off the highway, not part of any town, and its simple concrete offers none of the luxurious shine and gleam of cityscapes. This hospital would have been one of the first to close its doors. General practitioners, surrounded by the unknown, terrified of bearing infections to their own families, abandoned their buildings first, but small-town hospitals went next.

This hospital seems untouched. Padlocks hold tight chains looped around the exterior door handles; crude bars stripe the windows. Owen walks a circle around the building but sees no break or opening.

“It’s our lucky day. I don’t think anyone has been in here since they boarded it up.” He looks up at the second story windows, unboarded, unbarred.

“How do we get in?” Maisie asks.

“Push this here.” Owen grabs hold of the edge of a rolling trash can and positions it next to the rusty Emergency awning. He presses his weight on the top of it cautiously, leans into its give. The plastic bends and pops a loud warning of its weakness. Shedding his backpack, he lines himself up for the trajectory he will take. 

He will only have one chance to use it to climb up. In one fluid motion, he leaps onto it and jumps to the awning. The crushed plastic lid of the trash can clatters into its interior as he steadies himself above.

“Pass me the backpack.” He snags the strap she holds up to him. “Now give me your hand. I’ll pull you up.”

Maisie stretches, and he catches her by one hand and pulls. Standing together on the creaky awning, he explains what she needs to do simply and carefully. His brain is still unused to sharing its plans, formulating them for children, and he tries to imagine everything she might need to know once she gets inside the hospital. 

“I’ve got it, Owen.” She grabs the crowbar he is holding. “Just boost me up.”

He puts her on his shoulders and steadies her as she pries her way into the window. 

Once she has shimmied through, he hangs down from the awning and drops to his feet. He squats beside the woman. Finally still after days of movement, he breathes in and out. The woman becomes a human to him once more, not just a burden to be borne but a flesh and blood human, a person who remembers 4th of July barbecues and blind dates and blissfully ignorant banality, a person he wants to live.

His hand hovers over hers and then takes hold. The shaking, the pungent perfume of body odor and infection, the cold of her touch… they all promise death. He promises something else.

“You’re going to be alright, Red, and when you get better, we’ll figure out something out.”

The hospital doors clatter open six inches. Maisie’s nose appears from the darkness.

“I found these.” Bolt cutters emerge next.

“‘Atta girl.”

  
  


\-----------------------

  
  


_ Transcript of federal emergency radio broadcast, November 1999: _

Citizens are asked to remember that independent evacuation and relocation are forbidden at this time. District lines are to be treated as hard barriers. If you are found outside of your district, as a looter, smuggler, or asylum seeker, you will be subject to the severest penalty under U.S. martial law.

  
  


\---------------------

  
  


In the land of want, the hospital is a smorgasbord, untouched. The cabinets heap with unused supplies. Something low and hungry in Owen’s stomach awakens. Old muscle memory comes to life as he pushes through jars and reads label and tries to choose the best item. Not just the one bottle of Tylenol with three pills to rattle when it shakes. Not just a half-bloody bandage found on the side of the road. He thrills in the luxury of choice. He selects the classic: glass bottles of penicillin and clean syringes.

Suddenly he sees his hands for the first time in a long time: dirt crusted in the wrinkles of his knuckles, blood under his fingernails, grease along the outer edges of the palms. He flicks the sink in this emergency room wash station instinctively and then laughs at himself.

“There’s no water, you moron,” he mutters.

“There’s bottled water stacked in a closet over there,” Maisie suggests. “I don’t know why.”

“For the vending machines probably. Bring me one?”

“Sure.”

They scrub up side by side, wipe down surfaces, shake out untouched sheets, and put the woman in a bed. Owen’s fingers shake as he pumps two syringes of penicillin into her and rubs alcohol on the stitches he frantically sewed in days ago. 

The waiting game starts again, though it is not the same here. In the forest, he has a million things to do for survival, but this hospital is a fortress. Water in stacks, medicine in piles, magazines on racks, beds by the dozens…

“Maisie, come here.” Owen motions with one finger. The girl approaches. “We’re here now. Take advantage of it. Go find a shower and get clean. Read a dumb book. Play hockey in the hall with stale bagels. Be a kid, y’know. All of that.”

She looks utterly puzzled. “Hockey?”

Owen used to imagine himself leaving the Navy, getting a job working in livestock husbandry, and becoming a family man. The smiling wife and laughing children of his dreams had always been blurry, faceless, so generic as to be forgotten.

But now, zinging an empty tuna can down a hallway at Maisie with a broom, listening to her laugh, he remembers them again.

They looked nothing like this.

  
  


\--------------------------

 

_ Internal poster, Brooklyn Zoo, August 1998: _

CHA is everyone’s responsibility!

[image of therapod beside soapy hands]

Scrub your hands. Disinfect your tools. Report any symptoms.

  
  


\------------------------------

 

Two days later, the woman wakes up for the first time, turns her feverish mumblings into alertness. She jolts upright and then groans in agony. She falls back flat. The movement startles Owen awake too. His joints pop as he sits up in the uncomfortable metal and pleather chair he pulled beside the bed.

“Don’t bend. You pop open, and it’ll be a gruesome scene.” 

The woman searches in the darkness until her eyes, wide and foggy, find him. He fishes for the sedative he found earlier, injects it into her as quickly as he has two other times before, anything to keep her still enough to heal.

“Where is she?” Her throat bobbles.

Owen shakes his head. “You get shot in the stomach and wake up in a whole new place. Shouldn’t the question be ‘Where am I?’”

“That doesn’t matter.”

When she shudders and drops her head to the side, Owen cannot help. Unconscious, she had soothed at his touch. Taking her hand had made the anguished lines disappear, turned her fitful unconsciousness into sleep. Now she is awake, and he has lost her, or rather, has lost a version of her that never truly existed. Suddenly it matters that he does not know her name.

“The kid’s with me.” Owen tries honesty. “She’s fine. Let’s worry about you. You got a name?”

The woman relaxes, then stiffens again. She closes her eyes. Her voice is raw and desperate. “You can’t lose her. You can’t let anything happen to her.”

His protective instincts slosh inside of him. Maisie is asleep upstairs in a room overlooking the woods. The past weeks have taught him how hard-won and rare her sleep is, and for reasons he does not want to analyze too deeply, he has walked back upstairs twice tonight to check on her. Once he even lifted the thin blanket, kicked around her ankles during fitful dreams, back over her shoulders.

“A name,” he repeats.

She exhales, lays her hand over her stomach. Frown lines deepen her brow. “Claire.”

“So why are you chasing a kid, Claire?”

This time, only the faint movement of her lips separates awake from asleep. “She’s not what you think she is.”

He intends to rebuff her, to dismiss the ominous timbre, but something in her voice drags a question out of him instead. “What else could she be?”

The sedative bears her away without an answer, and the silence suddenly feels dangerous.

  
  


\--------------------------

 

_ Orders hand-delivered to Operation Overland, December 16, 1999: _

Following the recent incident in Stockton, Operation Overland’s termination is to be postponed. The Velociraptors have been certified as having completed their training. They are cleared for tracking missions. As such, prior to their termination, they will be used for a final mission. Temporary handlers will deploy the Velociraptors for the purpose of finding and apprehending the following persons:

CPO Owen Grady**

PO Nathaniel Gentry

PO Jessica Evans 

SN William Courtney

SN Arthur Mills

SN Martin Thrift

 

** Considered top priority

 

\----------------------

  
  


Claire awakens again in the lemony light of the morning, and this time, she is clear-eyed, guarded. She asks Owen for something to eat and drink, accepts the scrounged canned goods and bottled water with efficient manners, and does not mention Maisie at all. 

Even when Maisie walks downstairs, steps into the emergency bay, and sees the awakened woman, neither acknowledges the other. Claire continues to eat canned peaches and say nothing. Maisie, in a pair of jeans and an oversized hoodie, snatched from the hospital lost-and-found, looks out the window at the bright sunshine. Owen watches the dance of the two, older and younger, as they pretend not to be haunted by their last meeting, as if it is possible for a person to forget the tension of trying to kill one another.

Claire looks better, stronger. The sunken, waxy face has blood flow again, pink in its cheeks, gleam in its eyes. In the streaming sunlight, her eyes glow blue.

“Hey,” Maisie draws his attention. He turns to her. Her mouth has a strange twist. “We need food.”

He nods. After the putrid adventure of finding a full freezer and refrigerator after years without power, they had managed to find enough canned food, fruits and vegetables mostly, but fresh greenery and meat are irreplaceable. His stomach, accustomed to a woodland diet, rumbles its agreement.

“Yeah. We do.”

“I’ll go see what I can find if you want.” She cuts a look of pure venom at Claire. “I don’t much want to be here.”

“That sounds good. Take your rifle and stay close. Don’t leave the trees.”

“Okay. Be back soon, Owen.” She meets his gaze, says his name intently, as if it means something. It makes him want to reach out, pat her shoulder, tug at her ponytail. He resists the urge.

“Be careful,” he says as she disappears around the corner and out the door. Sometimes he thinks she moves too quickly, like a tape put on the slowest fast forward setting, just a little off, a little too smooth and fluid. Then he reminds himself he isn’t as young as he used to be. Back in his glory days, he probably moved the same way. Now he wakes up and has to snap, crackle, and pop before he hits full speed.

“You shouldn’t let her go by herself,” Claire says. He actually laughs.

“Oh yeah. Pipe up some more, parent of the year. Should I shoot her in the leg to make sure she doesn’t get away instead?”

Claire flinches. “I wouldn’t have shot her.”

Owen believes it, which makes the memory of Maisie, stone cold, prepared to execute Claire, all the more chilling. 

“She didn’t know that.” He chooses to defend the girl who has slept in his camp by choice, the terrified child running from a caravan of adults, as if he does not know she is capable of murder. “It was self-defense.”

“She did know,” Claire says. “She knows the last thing any of us would ever do is shoot her.”

Owen notices how she says shoot, not hurt, and thanks his gut for warning him whose side to be on. He has nothing else to say to her, not even questions to ask. 

“Aren’t you going to ask what she is?” Claire turns her body sideways, dangles her legs off the bed. She scoots closer until the soles of her feet skim the tile.

“She’s a kid who asked for my help. That’s all I need to know,” he says.

Claire clucks her tongue against the roof of her mouth but manages to then clamp it between her teeth, to not say anything else. She rocks upright. Even having made it to adulthood without major injury, Owen can imagine the difficulty she is about to have supporting her own body. Just as she lurches forward, he catches her. She grabs on with both hands.

“Easy, tiger. You’ve been on your back for well over a week.” 

She freezes. “Thanks.” 

It strikes him in an instant, her body all soft, round weight, her full breasts pressed against his chest, her warmth seeping into his bones. The arousal nearly doubles him over. He releases her, takes a step back as if she has burned his hands. He rubs them on his thighs and swallows hard.

If she notices, she says nothing. “Point me to the nearest thing to a bath and a toothbrush.”

“Okay.” His strangled voice makes him cough twice. 

Only when both the woman and the girl are gone from his sight does he sit down. Face buried in his palms, cock ramrod hard in his pants, he remembers the last time he had sex with anything more exotic than his left hand. 

In the early days of After, he moved with his unit, and his mouth waters at the memory of open, hungry Jess Evans in his sleeping bag. They had been two people hiding from their fear in ferocious intimacy. When CHA took her, brutally, angrily, violently, he had been ashamed of himself for not loving her. He had been ashamed to only have wanted to bury himself inside of her.

He swallows down the same shame now. Never did he imagine himself as the kind of man whose bodily urges could override everything else, but his nerve endings ache to touch and be touched. To ignore such a need is easy when alone or in the presence of a child or in the presence of a near-corpse. 

But the redhead, strong enough to stand on her own two feet, strong enough to flash him steely blue eyes and disagreement, changes everything. She reminds him what he needs and cannot have, for he has chosen his side. He will take Maisie and go home. Claire will not die now. His work is done. His bed is empty.

He grabs two bottled waters and slips off to find a place of his own to rinse clean and jack off. 

He avoids Claire through the afternoon, packing supplies into movable quantities, stripping the hospital of its lifesaving parts. She reads a magazine and watches the door.

Maisie doesn’t come back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I do a replay of _The Last of Us_ while still in a complete Clawen mood. This is unapologetically weird and out there.
> 
> The title is from the song "Blood on My Name" by The Brothers Bright.


End file.
